I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

Interesting: “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that they will be postponing the new “popular” movie category after widespread criticism. The new Oscars category will not be present at the upcoming 91st awards.” Blah blah blah, excuse excuse excuse, your guess is as good as mine as to why the change. No, really, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they’ve decided to let Black Panther have some of the big-kid nominations? Because that might have been the thing that did it.

They’re still doing the other stuff, like cutting down the time and doing all the tech awards during the commercial breaks. I’m sure that the technical people are thrilled about that. Absolutely thrilled. Then again, what does the Academy care about what I think? I haven’t watched the Oscars in at least a decade, and then I tuned in solely because Peter Jackson was sacking the place.

They’re cutting the Oscars down to three hours and adding a ‘popular film’ category. They’ll also be doing some of the technical awards during commercial breaks and airing them at other points. And, one presumes, there’s going to be a lot less flexibility when it comes to awards speeches.

The ‘Oscar thing,’ of course, is how the Academy apparently messed up giving the right envelope to the presenter for Best Picture and thus hi-jinks ensued. But that’s boring. I want to believe that something else made it happen. Something absurd, and light-hearted, and not going down dark paths. Seriously, nothing about Reptoids or anything like that. That always gets weird fast.

Moe Lane

PS: I already thought of blaming Deadpool for this one, but I don’t think Ryan Reynolds has the resources to set it up. Although he’s probably kicking himself now for not even trying.

Why? Because, frankly, Zootopia should have been up for Best Picture, period. But that’s an old complaint, so let’s try something different. Let’s just admit, once and for all, that genre movies are going to get the shaft when it comes to the ‘prestigious’ categories and instead do something like Best Science Fiction Picture and Best Actress in a Horror Movie and so on, and so on. They might get more people watching every year that way. Lord knows they could use the boost.

Spoiler alert: no Deadpool. Not even in the technical ghetto where they typically stick all the genre movies. Guess the Deadpool folks are going to have to console themselves somehow with gobs and gobs of money…

lolwhut: “…[Deadpool] was just nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Writers Guild Awards, which means it could very well end up getting an Oscar nomination! [snip] The WGA nominations frequently predict what the Academy is going to recognize in their Adapted and Original Screenplay nominations.” You know, I would pay money to see that happen, actually. It won’t happen, mind you, because the people who made Deadpool would naturally Deadpool their way across the entire Oscar proceedings.

Twice.

…And the Academy surely knows this. Still: my God, but the shtick the Deadpool guys would come up with. It would be entirely uncontained, not to say uncontainable. We’d all tune in to watch the red carpet show, at least until the FCC yanked it off the air and then seeded the ground with salt…

I mention this largely because my Twitter timeline is essentially obsessed by them, apparently. For myself, the last time I’ve actually watched any significant portion of the Academy Awards ceremony was 2004, when Peter Jackson was finally hailed God-Emperor of the Geeks by the Academy for The Lord of the Rings. That was an epic night, and I’ve shown no interest in the awards ever since.

I mean, is the program on tonight, or something? – Because it’s Thursday. I don’t see why they would have an awards program like this on on Thursday, right?

…No, you don’t give two [expletive deleted], either. Heck, you don’t even care about this year’s faux-controversy that they’ve come up with in order to drum up interest (and which I’m carefully not linking to, out of mild sadism).